Trevi and Clitumnus

 

In the vicinity of Trevi Edward Hutton visited the Temple of the ancient river god, Clitumnus.* In this brief chapter he quoted the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as Roman authors Pliny and Virgil.

 

 

The way from Foligno to Trevi takes one at once almost into Virgilian country, the valley of the Clitumnus. If the night is spent at Montefalco—not so daring an adventure as it seems—one must drive to Trevi by a way as pleasant as any in the world, following the river as it flows, and crossing both river and railway to climb up to Trevi. But the way by San Martino is beautiful exceedingly, and the torrents after the rain only add to the charm of the road. All travellers have wondered at Trevi since she perched herself on the top of her precipitous hill, and though few of them visited her on her lonely height, she impressed her memory upon them even from a distance….

 

Well, I was tired, too, when I came to Trevi at sunset, and the inn was poor even for an Umbrian albergo. But I forgot the poverty of my room in the relief of being able to sleep; and, indeed, the bed was soft and clean, things common in Italy even in the poorest places….

 

In this Virgilian country, Hutton quoted eight lines from Virgil's second Georgic that mentioned snowy flocks and sacred bulls bathing in the river.

 

The white, the snowy flocks of Clitumnus, where are they now? And the bull that bathed in the sacred stream before it was led the chiefest victim to the temples of the gods, the triumphs of Rome; and those temples, are they quite gone from our world? Let us see.

 

As you set out for Spello, if you are wise enough to go by road--it is but twelve miles--when you have passed a third of the way you come to a tiny Temple high over the stream, which here among the trees and the grass has its source. And it is the Temple of the river god that you look on, in all its little splendour of silence and ruin. At least, I hope it is; but some speak of a Christian building and will not listen to Pliny. But however that may be, it is a place too beautiful for any to pass by. I confess that, following the advice of the younger Pliny, I bathed there beneath the glancing, whispering poplars, and found, as he had said, the water as cold as snow. But in vain, in vain, I looked for the god Clitumnus and could not find him, though Pliny said that he was there, “not naked but adorned with the toga”. And then in the shade, within sound of the beautiful river, I read again in Virgil. Is it not thus one might desire to spend endless days?

But for the traveller by road the sun is ever something of a god; imperious as he is, he commands our days. He was slanting down the sky, reminding me that Spello was still far and I alone, and night would follow him. So I set out at last with regret; and later I came to San Giacomo in Poseta, where I saw some of the finest Lo Spagnas in Italy, especially a Coronation of the Blessed Virgin, his masterpiece, though stolen from Filippo Lippi. And so I came to the gates of Spoleto.

 

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*Note. The river is now called the Clitunno and flows into a tributary of the Tiber.

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 67-69. 

Montefalco and Benozzo Gozzoli

   

 

 

Montefalco is noted for its spectacular views of the surrounding countryside, as well as for its fine wines, but Edward Hutton visited the mountain of falcons to view the famous fresco cycle of the life of S. Francis by Benozzo Gozzoli.

 So the summer days passed, and when it was too hot in the valley I went up to Montefalco and found there coolness and silence.

 

The road to Montefalco is beautiful with views of the ever-changing valley and the mountains; and the little city herself stands high on her hill. Her unfrequented streets are still as of old, and she seems to look across the wide valley to Assisi as a daughter towards her mother. It is not Giotto who has clothed her with glory while telling the legend of S. Francis, but Benozzo Gozzoli, the pupil of Fra Angelico, with his simple literalism and delightful sense of the loveliness of such natural things as flowers and animals, who has painted for her the same immortal story—not in vain, for his influence is found again and again in such men as Bonfigli, Niccolo da Foligno, whose work one has learned to care for in Foligno and Assisi, and in Fiorenzo di Lorenzo.  Nor, as it seems to me, did Pintoricchio wholly escape his charm; much of his delight in these natural beauties which crowd his pictures is, it may well be, owing to the work of this Tuscan painter.

 It is in the little church of San Francesco—desecrated now and used as a picture-gallery—in which was once the choir, that we find the frescoes of the life of S. Francis, painted in the middle of the fifteenth century by Benozzo Gozzoli. It is here for the first time almost we come upon the growth, that development into some half-apprehended ideal, which every legend seems to follow. S. Francis was a man so like to Christ as almost to be mistaken for Him; it is therefore certain that he too, like the Prince of Life, was born in a stable. And even as old Simeon and Anna had prophesied of Christ, so a pilgrim tells of S. Francis, and a poor man spreads his coat for the saint to tread on. Thus gradually in the minds of men S. Francis became even in lesser things, a kind of imitation of Jesus of Nazareth….The frescoes continue the life of the saint almost as in the upper church at Assisi, where the traditional works of Giotto were doubtless known to Benozzo Gozzoli. These Montefalco frescoes are particularly interesting as the early work of a man who, brought by Fra Angelico to Rome and Orvieto—where, as here, his work is really an imitation of his master—was later to develop a more individual style, as in the frescoes in the Riccardi chapel, or at San Gimignano, or in his ruined masterpieces at Pisa, where he painted from 1469 to 1487. Here in Montefalco he is strictly the pupil of Fra Angelico. But in that attitude of the scholar to one who was so worthy of his allegiance, it may well be, we find his work really finer than when he had become himself a little master. … In his early work, however, under the influence of Angelico, he, having had a glimpse of heaven, turning to the earth he found it every whit as fair. … He tells the story of S. Francis, here in Montefalco, like a romantic almost, in which the spirit of adventure, the call of the road, the magical persistence of tomorrow blend very happily with the lovely life of the little poor man. Looking on these frescoes… his work is so boyish, as it were, as almost to disarm criticism, and in that very freshness, without ulterior ideas about art, he comes nearer perhaps than Giotto to realizing for us the romantic beauty of S. Francis’s life. He certainly realizes that, and strives to make us realise it as no other painter of the Franciscan legend has been able to do, before the far more exquisite and spiritual work of Sasseta. And so, though for no other cause yet for this, I return to Montefalco again and again.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 57-58

Spello: S. Francis and S. Clare

 After visiting some churches outside Spello's walls, Edward Hutton concluded his brief account of the town with a touching story about S. Francis and S. Clare.

It is delightful to walk to San Girolamo under the olives outside Porta Montanara with its frescoes, a Nativity by Perugino and others by followers of Pintoricchio and Mezzastris. Or to wander out of Porta Fontevecchia to Santa Maria della Rotunda, a fine Renaissance church, a Greek cross under an octagonal dome dating from 1517. Or to go to San Claudio, a small Romanesque and curiously asymmetrical  church of the twelfth century and to the Roman amphitheatre.

 

They say it was one day at Spello, when S. Francis and S. Clare were walking together and came to some osteria or other where they were given a morsel of bread, that as they sat there on the stones the people began to point at them with diffidenza and no little suggestion of evil and bisbigli malevoli, indirect allusions and jokes.

 

They went away in silence.

 

It was a winter’s day and the ground was covered with snow. Evening came on under the grey sky as they went. Presently S. Francis said:

 

“Sister Clare, hast thou understood what they were saying to us?”

 

S. Clare did not reply, for her heart was sorrowful, and she felt, if she had spoken, she could not have restrained her tears.

 

     “We must never do this again,” said, S. Francis at last.

 

S. Clare knelt down in the path on the desolate countryside.

 

     “What, never, Father? When then shall we meet again?”

 

     “When?” said S. Francis. “When the roses bloom in January.”

 

Marvellous and divine miracle! In a moment, a second of time, the whole mountainside was covered with roses, so that the air was filled with their perfume.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 48-9.